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At the tender age of twenty-five, while he was working part-time at an Italian restaurant in Tokyo's Kamata district, Kazuki Tomokawa released his debut record, fittingly titled Finally, His First Album. While he had already penned hundreds of songs, including his first single InchTry Saying You're Alive!,Inch written on a long train ride past fields and rice paddies, it was this recording that introduced Japan to one of it's most unique musicians of the postwar era. Each track, as record tag exec Kiichi Takahara writes in the LP's liner notes (here translated for the first time), is not a song but a Inchflesh-and-blood human being,Inch birthed by the singer-songwriter and the raw, guttural cries that would become a hallmark of his incomparable sound.1970s Japan was a time and place marked by a profound desire for authenticity amidst the onset of television and media saturation. Tomokawa arrived on the scene as a musician withInchthe personality of a hydrogen bomb,Inch to borrow a phrase from his frequent collaborator Toshi Ishizuka. In an unwieldy interview included here, members of the notorious leftist band Zun? Keisatsu (Brain Police) put it bluntly here was a man surrounded by the Inchdisingenuous,Inch the Inchwishy-washy,Inch and the Inchsuperficial,Inch who was delivering Inchreal life, unvarnished.Inch These songs are lullabies for the lost, staring not into the void but-as the fourth track declares-from inside it.Finally, His First Album is the first of three Tomokawa records to be reissued by Blank Forms Editions in conjunction with the US of Tomokawa's memoir, Try Saying You're Alive!, the first-ever English translation of his writing. This debut captures the self-assured trademarks that Tomokawa would hone over the course of decades. Multiple tracks are performed in his native Akita dialect, a distinct and highly regional vernacular of northern Japan se
